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Oh, the pains of Photoshop

Ok, so here’s the deal: I am a communications student, right? Therefore, I should be good at Photoshop, right?

WRONG!

Turns out, I have no CLUE as to how to work this program. The only thing I feel after working in Photoshop CS5 is frustration and a strong desire to hurl the computer screen across the room.

But that wouldn’t get me anywhere, now would it?

Nope. Not at all.

Anyway, our assignment for this week was to watch a few tutorials on Lynda.com (a VERY handy site for learning all kinds of computer software) and apply lessons learned to a photo that we took.

Easier said than done.

I went online to Lynda, watched 5 tutorials of one of the creators of Photoshop magically create a masterpiece out of an ordinary image, and then proceeded to attempt to duplicate the success on my own (all while The Lord of the Rings blasted annoyingly through the wall from next door, I might add). But for whatever reason, I didn’t have much luck.

I followed step-by-step the notes I had written down from the videos, but I still had no success! I guess it’s one thing to have to edit a single aspect of a photo – adding eye lights to the subject or just boosting the makeup – and another to try to do that along with adjusting the contrast, saturation, and hue of the photo (If you didn’t know, Photoshop is very picky about how your layers are organized when applying new filters and such).

After tedious editing and swearing, I managed to take this image of my friend Nicole…

Beginning Image

and turn it into this…

Final Image

It’s definitely an improvement, don’t get me wrong. You can see her more clearly because I lightened up the overall picture and added some color to her lips, but it came about more from accidental discovery than really understanding what exactly I did. My next step, if I were more proficient, would have been to lighten the eyes and take down the shadows in her face, but after trying to follow the tutorial’s directions (and failing), I decided it would be best to take a break from photo editing.

Maybe after a few more Lynda tutorials and practice, I’ll take another stab at it…hopefully without the LOTR’s epic soundtrack distracting me in the background.